Sebelius' Defense Lawyer

by Editor
October 23, 2013 at 4:01 pm

https://www.smartertimes.com/1036/sebelius-defense-lawyer

A front-page article in today's New York Times tries to defend against and explain away the criticisms of Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, following the fouled up rollout of the ObamaCare Web site.

Never mind that it's not really the role of a news article to take Ms. Sebelius's side against that of her critics, and never mind that if it were a Republican under attack, like, say, Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq War, the Times wouldn't be in defense attorney mode.

The arguments the Times gives in defense of Secretary Sebelius are pretty lame. For example:

Republicans insist the buck stops with the secretary. But although Ms. Sebelius runs the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency directly responsible for the health care law, there are questions about how deeply she was involved in the development of the troubled Web site.

The gist here is "Oh, there go those reckless Republicans, again, going after Ms. Sebelius even though it wasn't really her fault." But what the Times presents as exculpatory — "but although" she wasn't really that involved — is actually damning. Why wasn't she that involved? It turned out to be pretty important. Maybe she should have made it her business to get more involved instead of staying out and letting it fail. Did she deliberately stay out of it to try to avoid blame? That's the sort of question a tough or even reasonably skeptical report might try to answer.

Then there's this:

The ruckus over Ms. Sebelius, who is 65, may have roots in Kansas politics, where she rose to prominence as a daughter of a governor (John J. Gilligan of Ohio) and the daughter-in-law of a congressman, Keith Sebelius, a conservative Kansas Republican.

Please. The ObamaCare Web site doesn't work. No one was calling for this woman's resignation before the failed rollout. To say, dismissively, "Oh, this is just Kansas politics" is making excuses. Is it Kansas politics that is making the ObamaCare web site not work in all the other states that are not Kansas? Notice the way the Times doesn't even attribute this claim to Secretary Sebelius's defenders, but raises it itself using the speculative "may." At least the Times doesn't accuse the Sebelius critics of sexism, which "may" be the next step if the Web site doesn't start working and if the critics don't disband in the face of the defense mounted by the Times in this article.

One final note: The print headline for the article is "Sebelius Thrust Into Firestorm on Exchanges." At least the Times is using the term "Exchanges" rather than the newly Obama-preferred word "marketplace." "Thrust" is one of those newspaper terms that, because it is short, fits easily in a one-column headline. But it makes it sound like the Republicans are pushing Ms. Sebelius into a fire, rather than making it sound like the fire was of her own making. In the afternoon, the wording on the Times Web home page had changed and in my view improved to a more idiomatic and less tendentious "Sebelius Faces a Firestorm Over Health Exchanges."

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